Saturday, January 23, 2010

20th Century Family Physician - An Amazing Vintage Book Find

I usually moan and roll my eyes when my boyfriend brings something that he's found in the trash into our apartment. However, when it's something like this, I have to give him credit: he found gold. The 20th Century Family Physician, A Popular Guide for the Household Management of Disease published by John R. Stanton Co. in 1929 is a 1,130 page tome on all physical maladies, from "Constitutional Diseases" to "Diseases of Women and Children."

While I don't want to belabor the point that we've come a long way since 1929, I'll just throw out one quote to demonstrate this point:

"Man is essentially strong and selfish; woman, weak and generous. In man embodied the individual; in woman, the race...a fact illustrated by...peculiarities of women: In breathing, the child and the man employ largely the muscles of the abdomen; woman, on the contrary, breathes almost entirely with the chest, because of the mutual performance for her sexual duties compels the use of her abdomen muscles for other purposes than those of breathing."